One of the hardest things for me to wrap my brain around as a Christian is how a God who defines himself as love (1 John 4:8) and defines the greatest form of love as laying down your life for someone else (John 15:13) could lead Israel on a bloodbath in the Old Testament.

Dr. Heiser believes that as modern Christians we are “selectively supernatural.” Our modern worldview makes it difficult to recognize the full extent of the supernatural fingerprints on our Bible. While Bible scholars widely acknowledge the presence of “the divine council,” nephilim, and numerous other intersections between our world and the unseen realm in Scripture, passages like 1 Peter 3:19–20 rarely make it into sermons because to the vast majority of Christians, they are simply too foreign.